On 8/25/2011 5:36 PM, Joe Catania wrote:
No, the metal is certainly >100C (I think alot greater).
Electric heaters such as the ones in the eCat have an upper limit in temperature. It is much lower than a stove nichrome heating element, which goes up to about 1200°C.
As for an experiment I just turned up my electric stove (the small burner) to High until there was a dull red glow. As of 20 minutes after I turned the power off it was still able to produce steam when a drop of water was dropped on it.
I can see how that would be with drop of water (a fraction of 1 ml) but I believe this event was with the large eCat used in the first tests, with a flow rate of ~300 ml/m. That's 4.5 kg of water vaporized in 15 m, which takes a tremendous amount of heat. That's ~45,000 more water than your drop of water on the hot nichrome.
I think the eCat that went on with heat after death was the big one, used in the first test. I believe that is the machine they used in December and January. I don't recall the weight of it, but the video shows two people lifting it up and putting it on a weight scale with no difficulty. It is mostly an empty pipe . . . around 10 kg?
Assuming the power was anything close to the January 14 demo of 12 kW, you cannot even deliver that much electricity to the machine in the first place. It would burn up the wire. And even if you could, you can't store 4 kWh of heat (14,400 kJ) in 10 kg of metal. The specific heat of carbon steel is 0.49 kJ/kg K, so if there is 10 kg this would raise the temperature by 2,939 deg K.
http://www.translatorscafe.com/cafe/units-converter/energy/c/ http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-metals-d_152.html - Jed
